The publishing industry and, particularly the newspaper industry, has need to accurately count printed products for a variety of applications which include the formation of printed product bundles of a precise count, to name just one such application.
A number of different counting devices have been utilized in the publishing/newspaper field among which include mechanical counters, optical counters, and the like. It has also been well known in the industry for many years that existing technology employed to count printed products being conveyed on a conveyor without a gap between each product has been found to be far from perfect. One of the most common approaches at present is the utilization of a laser beam to detect the folded edge, i.e. the “spine”, of each printed product as it passes the laser beam.
Although the laser beam has replaced mechanical and other optical devices, since the laser beam has a diameter of the order of one millimeter, objects other than the folded edge, such as wrinkles, pin holes, tears, debris and loose paper material can easily trigger a false count. It is thus extremely valuable to provide a method and apparatus which substantially eliminates false counts.